Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Medical Faculty, Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany; Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7) Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany
William D Hopkins
Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Bastrop, United States
Department of Anthropology and Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, The George Washington University, Washington, United States
Steven J Schapiro
Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Bastrop, United States; Department of Experimental Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, United States
Svenja Caspers
Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany; Institute for Anatomy I, Medical Faculty, Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany; JARA-BRAIN, Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance, Jülich, Germany
Christian Gaser
Structural Brain Mapping Group, Department of Neurology, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany; Structural Brain Mapping Group, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany
Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Medical Faculty, Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany; Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7) Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany
Robert Dahnke
Structural Brain Mapping Group, Department of Neurology, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany; Structural Brain Mapping Group, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany; Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Medical Faculty, Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany; Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7) Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany
Chimpanzees are among the closest living relatives to humans and, as such, provide a crucial comparative model for investigating primate brain evolution. In recent years, human brain mapping has strongly benefited from enhanced computational models and image processing pipelines that could also improve data analyses in animals by using species-specific templates. In this study, we use structural MRI data from the National Chimpanzee Brain Resource (NCBR) to develop the chimpanzee brain reference template Juna.Chimp for spatial registration and the macro-anatomical brain parcellation Davi130 for standardized whole-brain analysis. Additionally, we introduce a ready-to-use image processing pipeline built upon the CAT12 toolbox in SPM12, implementing a standard human image preprocessing framework in chimpanzees. Applying this approach to data from 194 subjects, we find strong evidence for human-like age-related gray matter atrophy in multiple regions of the chimpanzee brain, as well as, a general rightward asymmetry in brain regions.
